i think i could reply to you: no,the sings are disable for everybody
because this forum has many visitors and users so a sign of 20kb means an hight bandwidth usage (20kb * 6 users every forum page) and i think that this website could have 200000 daily pages views so...it's too late for talking about giga and terabytes but you know they cant overcharge their server with signs.
I hope this reply is right if not ban me

Technical AdministratorStaffPremium

The guys above are right, signatures we're globally disabled a few months back (2-3 I think). It was done when we went back to the horizontal postbit with the user info in it. There will be more information added to this area in the not too distant future so for the sake of readability of the content on a page, and for the benefit of those guys who use higher values than the default 10 post per page we dropped them for the moment.

As Stefano alluded to, as a side benefit it also reduces the bandwidth required to serve each page to a single user, which across the site adds up to fair chunk. this means each user is served faster, freeing up resources quicker and making the site faster for everyone. Although page load times aren't too bad around Europe they do take a pretty big hit further afield so for none EU users any optimisation we can offer is generally welcomed. there are of course other solutions to this which I am looking into and hope to implement in the coming months. Based on the results of these we may then reassess the policy.

With the sigs being text only, I can assure you with the limited amount of text that was aloud the bandwidth was not an issue. At most the requirements would have been less than 5k per page as text can and is transferred rather quickly and with low overhead. Bandwidth becomes an issue once you introduce graphics, and there are a lot of pages that use graphics for different things.

Technical AdministratorStaffPremium

With the sigs being text only, I can assure you with the limited amount of text that was aloud the bandwidth was not an issue. At most the requirements would have been less than 5k per page as text can and is transferred rather quickly and with low overhead. Bandwidth becomes an issue once you introduce graphics, and there are a lot of pages that use graphics for different things.